Working Smart

Unsubscribe Me!

I don’t know about you, but I receive way more email than I like. This past weekend, I realized that about 20 percent of it comes from email newsletters and companies I’ve done business with in the past. Half of it, I don’t recall opting into—even legitimate companies. Most of it is a complete waste of my time. Worse, much of it is downright annoying. In the words of David Allen, it consumes “psychic ram.”

These messages are not exactly spam, so my spam blocker doesn’t filter them out. So, in the past, I have simply deleted these unwanted messages as I receive them. But as the volume has increased, I have decided I must get more aggressive. I am now scrolling to the end of each message and clicking on the “Unsubscribe” link. Sure it takes a few more seconds, but it is far more satisfying than merely hitting the delete key. Hopefully, I will only have to do this once and thereby incrementally reduce the clutter in my life. I am looking forward to a leaner, meaner inbox!

Technorati Tags: clutter, entourage, productivity, email

Taming Your E-Mail Inbox, Tip #2

Read Once, Then Decide

The most unproductive thing you can do when it comes to e-mail is to read the same messages over and over again. This has the effect of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your workload. Instead, you should read each message once, then decide what to do with it. Read-decide. Read-decide. This is the pattern of effective e-mail processing. The goal is to end up with an empty inbox daily or, at the very least, every couple of days.

According to author David Allen (Getting Things Done), you need to first decide if the message is actionable. There are only two possible responses to this: yes or no. If the answer is no, it is a Non-Actionable Message. You then have three possible choices:

1. Delete the message. It is no longer needed. Spam, most ads, and many e-mail newsletters fall into this category.
2. File it for later reference. It may be useful later. However, you don’t want to let it sit in your inbox consuming psychic energy. Instead drag it into a folder. Personally, I drag everything into a folder called Reference. By the way, I don’t use a complicated set of Outlook folders. Instead I use Google Desktop Search to locate messages I have filed away for future reference. In my opinion, if you use additional folders, you only add another layer of complexity. You have to ask and decide, “In which folder does this message go?” Instead, with a good search engine, all you have to do is remember a key word or two and call up all the messages that contain those words. Using this methodology, I can find almost any message in a matter of seconds.
3. Incubate it for later consideration. No action is required now, but something might need to be done later. I drag these into my Someday folder.

If the message is an Actionable Message, you also have three choices:

1. Delegate it to someone else. If the action requires an action, you have to ask, “Am I the right person to do it?” If not, then you need to delegate it. Even if you don’t have a staff, you can still delegate it to someone else in the organization. The best way to do this is to forward the e-mail message to the person who needs to act on it. Then—and this is critically important—immediately go to your Sent folder and drag the message to a @WaitingFor folder. You can then review this folder periodically to follow up on assignments you have made. (I’ll tell you how to automate this in a minute.)
2. Do it now. Assuming you are the right person, and assuming you can do it in two minutes or less, then do it now. Just take care of it, and get it off your plate. This is David Allen’s “Two Minute Rule,” and I have found it to be a great boon to my personal productivity.
3. Defer it for later. If you can’t do it in two minutes or less, then you need to make another decision. One option is to schedule a specific time to do it. This is particularly useful if you have a deadline you are trying to meet. The easiest way to do this is to drag the message to your Calendar folder and schedule an “appointment” with yourself. If it needs to happen on a specific day but not a specific time, then make it an all-day event. If it doesn’t need to be done by a specific time, you can drag the message to your Task folder and schedule a Next Action. I then periodically review my tasks through the week and select things to do that take longer than two minutes.

If you are a visual learner, then you will want to take a look at David Allen’s Advanced Workflow Diagram (this is a PDF file). You will find this diagram useful for both your electronic inbox and your physical inbox.

I also highly recommend David Allen’s “white paper,” called Getting Things Done Using Microsoft Outlook.

Finally, I also recommend David’s Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In, which automates the entire process I have described above. It adds a toolbar to your Outlook inbox that looks like this:

With this toolbar, you can perform the actions I have described above (and more) with one click. The software is not cheap ($69.95), but, considering what it will do for your productivity, it’s a great investment. Best of all, you can download a fully-functional trial version and use it for 30 days before you decide.

Taming Your E-mail Inbox, Tip #1

Only Process E-mail at Designated Times

In my experience, most people are overwhelmed by their e-mail. Throughout the day, they are bombarded with e-mail messages. Like a tennis match from hell, some feel obligated to hit every ball back across the net as soon as it lands in their court. Others eventually give up and allow the tennis balls to cover them up. Occasionally, they take a swing, but they can never seem to dig out from under the pile. Meanwhile, the never-ending assault of e-mail messages continues.

Enough of this madness! The problem is in the assumption. Contrary to popular opinion, there is not a law that says you must answer every e-mail as it is received. In fact, this is a sure-fire way to kill your productivity and end up becoming a slave to e-mail rather than using it as a tool to accomplish your work on your terms.

One simple way to do this is to schedule specific times of day to work on e-mail. For example, I check e-mail first thing in the morning, before I go to lunch, and at the end of the day. Since I use Outlook for things other than e-mail (e.g., calendaring, task management, etc.), I keep it running all day; I just work in offline mode. When I am ready to download e-mail at one of my designated times, I press F9, which initiates the Send/Receive All action. I then process each e-mail message. When I am done, I press F9 again to send any messages I have created.

The advantage of this is that I never work on e-mail for more than about 45 minutes a day. Using the two-minute rule, I handle any e-mail that can be done in less than two minutes. If I think it will take longer than that, I either add it to my task list or schedule a time to do it. (I’ll talk more about this in another Tip.)

How do you work offline? First, make sure that you have Outlook set to “manually detect connection state.” Here’s how to do it in Outlook 2003:

1. From the Outlook main screen, select Tools | E-mail Accounts.
2. Make sure that View or change existing e-mail accounts is selected on the E-mail Accounts wizard and click on Next.
3. Make sure Microsoft Exchange Server is selected and click on the Change button. This should take you to Exchange Server Settings. Click on the More Settings … button. You should get a dialog box that looks like this:



In the When starting section, make sure that Manually control connection state is selected and Choose the connection type when starting is checked.

4. Click OK, Next, and then Finish to get back to Outlook.

Now quit Outlook by pressing Alt-F4 or File | Exit.

Re-launch Outlook. You should get a dialog box that asks you whether you want to Connect to the server, Work Offline or Cancel. It looks like this:

Select Work Offline.

When you want to download your e-mail, simply press F9.